Thermal images of systems that include electrical and/or mechanical devices and structures can be useful for monitoring and/or analyzing the performance thereof, both during design and development, for example, for design optimization purposes, and during operational service, for example, for inspection and maintenance purposes. The thermal, or infrared images may be captured and displayed by an infrared (IR) camera module of a thermography system; the IR camera module may include a focal plane array (FPA) of microbolometers, for capturing IR radiation, and electronics which are adapted to convert the captured IR radiation to temperature data, and then to scale and map the temperature data to an array of pixels, wherein a color, or a gray-scale value, of each pixel corresponds to a detected temperature, or temperature range.
In recent years thermography systems have been developed to include a visible light (VL) camera module in conjunction with the IR camera module, so that thermal images can be merged with corresponding visible light images in order to provide a more tangible/structural context for the thermal images. Those skilled in the art call this merging of images ‘fusion’, and methods for fusion are known in the art, for example, being described in commonly assigned U.S. patent application publication US 2008/0099678, which is hereby incorporated by reference, in its entirety. A variety of methods for presenting a thermal image fused with a corresponding visible light image are known in the art, one example of which is known as FLIR Triple Fusion™, wherein an infrared image may be moved, resized and reshaped inside a visible light image. Yet, there is still a need for new methods for presenting thermal images that can improve the ease of viewing the thermal images, for more efficient monitoring and/or analysis of systems.